EPJ featured talk: Theory of open heavy-flavor as probes for deconfinement

An overview of heavy quarks (HQs) as probes of hot QCD matter is presented. Although HQ production IS described within perturbative QCD, their interaction with the evolving quark-gluon plasma (QGP) occurs in a strongly coupled regime. HQs provide a unique opportunity to investigate in-medium dynamics, making them useful probes for constraining transport properties. Recent lattice QCD results have shown that HQ interactions are largely non-perturbative, particularly near Tc, where the extracted spatial diffusion coefficient, 2πTDs ≈ 1-2, suggests rapid HQ thermalization. This opens the way for a new theoretical predictions and phenomenological studies. In parallel, there is increasing interest in using HQs to probe the early stages of heavy-ion collisions, in particular, to study the role of Glasma fields in HQs dynamics. This provides new opportunities to relate the HQ phenomenology with early-stage. Finally, the large heavy-baryon production observed from pp to AA collisions challenges hadronization scenarios and highlights the importance of recombination mechanisms, particularly in light of recent experimental measurements of collective flow for charmed hadrons.